In mid-18th-century England, any of a group of women who met to discuss literature.
Attempting to replace the playing of cards and such social activities with more intellectual pursuits, they held "conversations" to which they invited men of letters and members of the aristocracy with literary interests. The term probably originated when Mrs. Elizabeth Vesey invited the learned Benjamin Stillingfleet to one of her parties; he declined, saying he lacked appropriate dress, until she told him to come "in his blue stockings"
the ordinary worsted stockings he was wearing at the time. The word bluestocking came to be applied derisively to a woman who affects literary or learned interests.